[Tutor] Tutor Digest, Vol 102, Issue 98

[Steven D'Aprano]

On 31/08/12 18:31, Mark Lawrence wrote:
> On 31/08/2012 04:27, William R. Wing (Bill Wing) wrote:
>>
>> How about -
>>
>>>>> for item in iter(list):
>>>>> ….print item
>
> Overengineering? :) A list is an iterator.


Technically, no it isn't, it is an "iterable" or a "sequence" but
not an iterator.

py> mylist = [1, 2, 3]
py> next(mylist)
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: list object is not an iterator



You are right to question the call to iter, it is redundant in this
case, but your terminology is mixed up.

There are three terms normally used to describe things that can
be used in for-loops:

Sequence
   The generalisation of lists, tuples and strings. Any object that has
   a known length where individual items can be retrieved with the
   __getitem__ method called sequentially: obj[0], obj[1], obj[2], ...

Iterator
   Any object that obeys the "iterator protocol", that is, it must have
   a method __iter__ which returns itself, and a method __next__ which
   returns the iterator items one at a time, then raises StopIteration
   when there are no more items. Examples of iterators include generator
   expressions, generators, the functions from the itertools module,
   and in Python 3, built-ins map, filter and zip.

Iterable
   Any object which can be iterated over, that is, a sequence or
   iterator.


The iter() built-in calls the object's __iter__ method. If the object
is already an iterator, it returns itself unchanged. Since lists are
not iterators, iter(list) returns a new iterator object:

py> it = iter(mylist)
py> it
<list_iterator object at 0xb7caa82c>
py> iter(it) is it
True



-- 
Steven